Disable Recent Items in Jump Lists for Certain Programs

Is there any way to turn off the recent items in the jumplists of specific programs in Windows 7? This feature is useful on some programs (like my text editor) but there are other programs that I don't need everyone to see what I've opened recently (like my video player). I've searched around for a solution to this and I've found two "solutions":

1. Turn off recent items in all jumplists (open the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties and uncheck the "Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar").
2. Manually clear the recent items history.

Neither of these options seem very useful to me. #1 seems like the better solution if you really don't want someone to see your recent documents but then you lose that functionality for all programs instead of just the ones you want while #2 seems like it's something that's way to easy to forget about.

The Jump lists for each program are stored in "%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations" but they are in a binary format with an obscure name. e.g. "8fbb9843e86d54f4.automaticDestinations-ms" (which I will refer to as .adms from now on)

It is possible to discover which .adms belongs to which program with a little trial and error.

• Open a video.

• Put the AutomaticDestinations folder into Detail view and Sort by Date Modified.

  Only one or two .adms should be showing as modified in the past minute. One is probably Explorer's list of recent folders, the other should be your program.

• Delete one of the .adms then try to open your program's jump list. (Programs in the Start menu will still show the jumplist arrow, you have to click to see if it opens or does nothing)

Once you have identified the correct .adms, undelete it and set the file properties to Read-only (this completely disables the jumplist)*

Alternatively, make a note of the filename and go in and delete it whenever you need to. Windows will recreate it with the same name.

* I tried changing other permissions, but it wants full write permissions or it won't work at all!?!

To selectively disable taskbar jump list per application permanently:

• Open the folder with jump list databases in Explorer (there is a file per application): %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations
• Download a free program called strings from Windows Sysinternals into the folder from previous step
• Launch cmd.exe and navigate to jump lists directory
  cd %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations
• Strings.exe allows to extract readable words from any binary file, which allows to understand which application created a given jump lists binary database. Copy paste the below command to create a .txt file with strings for each jump lists database:
  for %i in (*Destinations-ms) do @strings -n 5 %i >%i.txt
• Review .txt files to determine which application a jumplist belongs to. Use command line: findstr /I adobe *.txt or open .txt files in an editor - the application that created them would be obvious from application names and recently accessed file names
• The fun part of disabling taskbar jump lists for an application is remarkably simple: create a directory with the same name as the jump list database file name. On my PC, to disable jump lists for Adobe Reader, I deleted ee462c3b81abb6f6.automaticDestinations-ms and created a new directory with the same name. If you ever decide to use disabled jump lists again - delete the directory and Windows will re-create the jump lists database file and the jump list history within it

Solution was originally posted at istomin.de

If nothing else works, you might try setting up different accounts per user on the machine.

To entirely disable a jump list, using Google Chrome as an example, open Notepad and enter the following:

Set WshShell=Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
WshShell.Run "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe",7,FALSE

Save the file as a .vbs file. I use Internet.vbs in a folder I made as C:\Windows\Scripts\. Somewhere create a new shortcut to Internet.vbs. I named the shortcut Internet. Then pin the Internet shortcut to the Start Menu. You can even go into the shortcut properties, change icon, go to the Google Chrome executable file, select open, and use the Google Chrome icon for the shortcut.

Since the pinned item points to a .vbs script instead of the executable itself, there will not be any jump list at all.